The present invention concerns the association between items in a sales area and locations in said sales area.
The display of information relating to items offered for sale in a sales area is generally obtained by means of labels displaying the price of the item in particular with which a label is associated, and other information such as price per weight, etc.
The need to update displayed information has warranted the installation in numerous sales areas of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) provided with a screen on which display of information is remotely controlled.
The usefulness of such systems is essentially to provide consumers with product information, at the shelving of a sales area such as a supermarket, hypermarket, pharmacy or any other sales area, relating to each item offered for sale e.g. the price that reliably corresponds to information such as contained in the central file of the site i.e. information such as will effectively be used at the cash-out for payment of the item.
Another advantage of these known systems is to allow automated changes to be made to product information within much shorter times than with manual display, whether for particular periods of on-site special offers, for all or part of the items on sale, for reflecting cost price changes, for keeping up with inflation situations when prices must be very frequently increased, etc.
FIG. 1 illustrates an assembly 100 formed of a rail 101 and ESLs 102. Each ESL 102 comprises a casing 103 inside which the functional constituents of said ESL 102 are housed. An ESL has a display screen 104 to display information relating to an item with which it is associated. Typically, this information comprises the price of the item and other information usually displayed in a sales area e.g. the price per kilogram for a food product.
In addition, the ESL 102 comprises a radiofrequency communication module to receive data representing information on an item sent by a central station connected to a computer system, a memory to store said data and a microcontroller to control display of information relating to the item. These different functional constituents are arranged on a printed circuit board housed in the casing 103. The casing 103 also contains a battery cell for electrically powering the ESL 102.
The rail 101 has a U-shaped cross-section and the ESLs 102 are housed in a channel 105 formed by a bottom part 106, an upper edge 107 and a lower edge 108, the ESLs being housed between said bottom part 106, the upper edge 107 and lower edge 108.
The rail extends over the entire length of the side edge of a shelf 109 in the sales area and houses as many ESLs 102 as there are different items arranged on the shelf 109. It is therefore possible to have up to more than ten ESLs 102 per meter of rail and hence several thousand even tens of thousands of ESLs within a sales area.
Insofar as an ESL 102 comprises a high number of components, in particular electric and electronic components, an ESL 102 is therefore a costly device. The large number of ESLs 102 required to equip a sales area therefore amounts to a high cost which may become prohibitive.
It is one objective of the present invention to propose a system to display information in a sales area that is simpler and less costly and has simplified maintenance.